“19th century coal miners would traditionally take canaries in cages down into the mine with them. The birds would act as an early warning system for carbon monoxide gas. When the canary stopped singing the miner would know that he had to escape the chamber he was in.”
“This particular yellow canary was obviously a favoured pet as well as a working bird. Inscribed with the legend : ‘In Memory of Little Joe. Died November 3rd 1875. Aged 3 Years’”
"The language forged by black people in this country, on this continent…got us from one place to another. We described the auction block. We described what it meant to be there. We survived what it meant to be torn from your mother, your father, your brother, your sister. We described it. We survived being described as mules, as having been put on earth only for the convenience of white people. We survived having nothing belonging to us, not your mother, your father, not your daughter, not your son. And we created the only language in this country."
James Baldwin, Black English: A Dishonest Argument (via theeducatedfieldnegro)
Just as a prism splits light into a spectrum of colors, birefringence is the optical phenomenon when light is split into two rays of the same color as it passes through certain materials. Birefringence can be found in nature as seen in this freshwater protozoa. Molecules within the protozoa refract light into different beams as a polarized filter is rotated. In medicine, birefringence can be used to determine the thickness of the optic nerve to help monitor glaucoma or to help determine embryos that have the highest chance for successful pregnancy for in vitro fertilization.
It is important to remember that the incarcerated population is not counted in unemployment statistics. The building of prisons as a way of creating jobs in many economically depressed rural communities has been a boon to local elites. Prisons have been increasingly outsourced to private corporations for profit while also enabling the true face of unemployment to remain hidden.
Sound Before the Fury of The Oppressed: George Jackson, Attica and the Prisoners’ Rights Movement Today (via navigatethestream)
The Transgender Oral History Project (TOHP) is a collaboration-based resource. Our mission is to promote a diversity of stories from within the transgender and gender variant communities by supporting community members who wish to share their stories. We accomplish this through by promoting grassroots media projects, documenting people’s experiences, and teaching media production skills. Learn more at www.transoralhistory.com.
The Fellowship
TOHP is a five-year old organization that has recently received enough grants and other funds to create a paid fellowship for 15-20 hours per week for one year. We are seeking a fellow to help increase our organizational capacity and assist with administration. The Trans Oral History Fellow will need to be able to work independently while being supervised by a group of core volunteers.
The Trans Oral History Fellow will recruit and coordinate volunteers, conduct outreach, develop community leaders, organize trainings, collaborate with allied organizations, and help expand our capacity to accept speaking engagements and presentations. The Trans Oral History Fellow will work from home most often and have a flexible schedule. Candidates should be prepared to travel when needed to conferences and speaking engagements as well as travel within Chicago to attend events and meetings. A successful candidate should display a strong sense of organization as well as the ability to keep track of volunteers’ skills, needs and accountabilities. Attendance at biweekly meetings and effective communication with core group members are an important part of the fellowship. Priority goes to a well-rounded candidate who is willing to learn and able to delegate.
Required:
Highly organized
Excellent written and verbal communication skills
Experience teaching, facilitating, or leading workshops in community venues
Proficient at using google docs, twitter, and facebook
Capacity to balance multiple projects
Ability to interact comfortably with people from all different racial backgrounds, socioeconomic classes, and education levels
Ability to supervise and direct interns
Experience with transgender and gender variant communities
Commitment to the goals and mission of the Trans Oral History Project
Preferred:
Experience writing grants
BIlingual
Competency in managing Drupal website
Experience negotiating paid gigs and/or coordinating public events with college campuses
Enthusiasm about learning new skills
Bachelors degree or some college experience
Transgender, gender non-conforming people, and people of color encouraged to apply.
Time-travel made sense to me because how else do I explain how I got from Villa Juana, from latrines and no lights, to Parlin, NJ, to MTV and a car in every parking space? Not just describe it but explain the missing emotional cognitive disjunction? I mean, let’s be real. Without shit like race and racism, without our lived experience as people of color, the metaphor that drives, say, the X-Men would not exist! Mutants are a metaphor (among other things) for race, and that’s one of the reasons that mutants are so popular in the Marvel Universe and in the Real. I have no problem re-looting the metaphor of the X-Men because I know it’s my silenced experience, my erased condition that’s the secret fuel that powers this particular fucking fantasy. So if I’m powering the ship, at a lower frequency, I’m going to have a say in how it’s used and in what ports of call it stops.
For another example, we have as a community been the victim of a long-term breeding project—I mean, that was one component of slavery: we were systematically bred for hundreds of years—but in mainstream literary fiction nobody’s really talking about breeding experiments. If you’re looking for language that will help you approach our nigh-unbearable historical experiences you can reach for narratives of the impossible: sci-fi, horror, fantasy, which might not really want to talk about people of color at all but that takes what we’ve experienced (without knowing it) very seriously indeed. Shit, they’ve been breeding people in sci-fi since its inception (The Island of Doctor Moreau) and the metaphors that the genres have established (mostly off the back of our experiences as people of color: the eternal other) can be reclaimed and subverted and expanded in useful ways that help clarify and immediate-ize our own histories, if only for ourselves. To quote Glissant again: this time that was never ours, we must now possess. Because it certainly has no problem possessing us any time it wants.
- Junot Diaz, on sci-fi and race (via dearlittleblackgirls)
People have a tendency to conflate these terms in ways that are problematic. In fact, in social science they have very different meanings, and understanding them better can help us have more productive discussions, I think.
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